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This is a very old entry — images are small, formatting is off.

For a company infamous for their optimization obsessiveness where every nano-second and shade of blue is a matter of life and death, a change as radical as the one seen above must not have come easily. E-mails to Brand New spotting the new logo in the wild started coming in as early as March February and while I was hesitant to post based on a few intermittent reports, it seems now the change is official and, like all things Google, a big deal. The change to the logo comes as part of a bigger redesign of the Google search experience that started to be rolled out yesterday for users in 37 languages — although I’m sure English is one of them, my own Google remains stuck in 2009.

Above: Old and new logos. Below: Old and new Gooooogle.

This change is the equivalent of having the music or TV volume at, say, 7, then turning it up to 11, having someone complain is too loud and turning it back down to 9, making it seem less loud, but still louder than before. A convoluted metaphor, but the new logo seems better because the old one was just so much worse, despite it being the exact same thing — structurally speaking, since the letterforms are exactly the same. By contrast, it is indeed an improvement and the change demonstrates how easy it is to get accustomed to something that isn’t quite as pleasant as it could be but the familiarity of it makes it seem pleasant. Perhaps three or five years down the road, we might actually see the wordmark by itself, no shading, no drop shadow… revolutionary!

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An Inconvenient Drop Shadow

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For a company infamous for their optimization obsessiveness where every nano-second and shade of blue is a matter of life and death, a change as radical as the one seen above must not have come easily. E-mails to Brand New spotting the new logo in the wild started coming in as early as March February and while I was hesitant to post based on a few intermittent reports, it seems now the change is official and, like all things Google, a big deal. The change to the logo comes as part of a bigger redesign of the Google search experience that started to be rolled out yesterday for users in 37 languages — although I'm sure English is one of them, my own Google remains stuck in 2009.